


City that never sleeps

by Insecuriosity



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding, attempt at cityformer worldbuilding, tf summer gift exchange 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 09:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15507534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Insecuriosity/pseuds/Insecuriosity
Summary: How does a wounded cityformer spend its time now that the war is over?





	City that never sleeps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [White Aster (white_aster)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/gifts).



> I’ve always really enjoyed your work White_Aster and I was really happy to get you for my exchange! I really hope that this fic is what you hoped to see in your prompt! I picked ‘Metroplex caring for the little bots inside of him and worldbuilding’. Not sure how well I did on it but I hope you enjoy it!

It is funny to him sometimes, the way mecha think they have privacy within his walls. Funny in a way that isn’t entirely humorous, funny in a way that makes old memories bubble up from unpleasant times, but he never let himself linger on that thought. 

There is a lot for him to monitor. A rough estimate of 2,9 million sensor nodes around his frame all sending information to his cranial unit for processing. He can count himself lucky that a quarter of them are at the bottom of his frame, nestled against unmoving and uninteresting Cybertronian ground. All the others are exposed to a constant and shifting barrage of tapping pedes, spinning wheels, and any number of other frame-parts rubbing up against them.  
The mecha that live inside of him seem to think that it makes him a wholly different brand of Cybertronian. That, because of the number of sensors in his frame, he wouldn’t be able to keep track of every single mech living in his walls. 

They would be right, if it was still the golden age. They would have been right in thinking that Metroplex would rather shut them all out and focus on something else; if it had still been the golden age. There had been too many mecha to keep track of then. Hundreds of mecha leaving his borders, hundreds entering, and always mecha trying to contact him for reasons spanning from inane to destructive.  
It isn’t the golden age anymore. It is an age that hadn’t been named yet because everyone is still struggling to find purpose in their life without war. Metroplex iss the busiest city on a planet decimated by war. With a near 70% vacancy in his buildings and streets so rarely travelled that he does not bother to turn on his lights near them, he has processing threads _idling_ at every moment of the daycycle! 

So, Metroplex watches the mecha that live in him. Not as a crowd of blurry mech-shapes, or a horde of buzzing little annoyances clamouring for him to do their bidding – but as people. 

-

Windblade is an oddity among the Cybertronian people. Unsure, soft, and thrust into a position of power amongst mecha that have committed atrocities, she is like a dancer on a tightrope. 

During her daycycles she speaks with people to try and give them hope, a job, or to make friends. Most Cybertronians don’t even recognise her attempts at friendliness, their expectations of other mecha warped by war.  
She reads in her spare moments. Articles from the only news source in Metroplex’s walls and books on leadership and diplomacy. Anything to try and stand her ground in the little games that Starscream likes to play to try and make her look incompetent or unpleasant. 

She cares for Metroplex. She is his only visitor, and she asks him about his repairs, and how he feels. She does not mention how great it would be if he was more outspoken about his approval for her as politician. She never asks him to prove his loyalty to her by killing an opponent, or to spy on Starscream.  
As a cityspeaker she undoubtedly knows that he is watching his inhabitants, and it means much to Metroplex that she never asks him to spy for her. 

When she is stuck in a loop, re-reading the same pages and chapters over and over after Starscream trampled her into the dust with his words, he pings her that he would like to speak with her. With all other engagements forgotten Windblade comes to sit by his brainmodule to talk, and as moments turn into breems her plating will loosen up and her tightly held wings will begin to emote again.  
On days where he can’t find the energy to speak with her when she needs it, he pings Chromia, so he can watch the two of them take a break and chat about life on Caminus. 

-

Chromia is hard. Harder than some of the soldiers that managed to make it to the end of the war. As far as Metroplex knows, nothing happened to make her this way – it is simply who she is. A spark made out of sharpened and gleaming steel. 

He can see it in the way she picks her activities. She picks only jobs that will challenge her and then she heaps on the additional responsibilities – sometimes in accord with the mecha around her, and sometimes simply on her own assumptions. She can take more than the average mech, and she loves her resilience as much as she wants to relieve others.  
Metroplex knows that, should she ever need to, she would be able to weather extreme suffering. Much like ununtrium, it would take immeasurable impact to dent her, but Metroplex knows that such strength comes with its own drawbacks. Chromia would not break. Much like the ununtrium he compares her to, she would only dent and warp. Until it would be impossible to shape her back into who she used to be. Not broken; but _bent_ beyond repair. 

Metroplex hopes that her strength will never have to be tested. Just because she could withstand it does not mean she ever should. 

On moments where she is frustrated by the limits of what her strength can do for her friends, Metroplex finds her something to exert her control over. Petty criminals painting obscene words on his plating that she can detain. A frightened MTO lost in his citywalls that she can talk sternly to and send home.  
When there is too much frustration, or there is only a deep growing sadness, Metroplex pings her with a selection of movies. It doesn’t always work, but he knows that sometimes just the attempt is enough to help.  
-

 

Starscream is damaged. Metroplex wonders how many mecha see how deep his scars go – and how many of them care enough to try and help. Starscream has violent recharge purges that wake him up every night, as if on schedule.  
He storms from his berth as if enraged, with his secret armblade extended and his optics promising death. He stalks his apartment and checks all the locks and encryptions. He pours himself a cube of energon, and that is when the walls begin to come down. Or perhaps where they crumble under the weight of war. 

Starscream sometimes talks as if there is someone there with him. Entire onesided discussions with a mech whose name Metroplex only knows because Starscream sometimes screams it into a corner or whispers it when his tirades come to an end.  
Starscream must be aware that he is hallucinating, or he would not show his weakness. The mech that Metroplex sees and feels during the day is confident and powerful, as quick on his feet as he is sly.

When the moments of panic are over, Starscream falls into work. He pulls employees and lackeys out of their recharge to scold them and order them around – a way to regain control by any means necessary.  
There are moments where he mumbles. Not to his hallucination of Bumblebee, but to Megatron. “You said I’d never get here, and yet here I am while you’re on some hopeless mission.” He’d said with a near manic glint in his optics. “I win. I win.”

He never sounds as if he believes it.

He looks at the people around him as tools, as dangerous as they are useful, and he does all he can to remove the ones he is afraid of.

Metroplex does nothing to help. He knows which things and therapies could enhance his life, but he knows Starscream would see it as an attack. Starscream needs someone to trust, someone whom he cannot sacrifice for the power that he obsesses over, and someone who will trust him implicitly.  
In short, Starscream needs a miracle that nobody can provide. Least of all Metroplex. Starscream is afraid of Metroplex. Not only because he is large enough to reduce the seeker to a smudge on the surface of Cybertron, but because Metroplex holds a status that nobody else does.

If Metroplex says to distrust Starscream, the people will listen. If Metroplex says he does not want Starscream to rule the people in his city, they will tear Starscream from his throne and throw him out faster than Metroplex could say “just kidding.” 

So Metroplex does nothing to help Starscream. Nothing of what he would want to do to help him, anyway. Whenever Starscream is trembling in his habsuite and testing his energon for poison, Metroplex tries to think of ways that he could help Starscream without setting him off. Without awakening the seeker’s paranoia and scepticism. 

He comes up with a tiny way to help. When Starscream is talking to the ghost of a mech, Metroplex ensures that his doors make a far-louder-than-usual ‘whoosh’. It is not always enough, because sometimes Starscream _yells_ , and even Metroplex’s walls can’t stop his voice from carrying through the building, but it is something. 

-

 

Prowl is like Starscream in more ways that most mecha would not want to admit. Ruthless and alone, he has the same kinds of optics as Starscream. Optics that look at mecha as if they are tools. Their biggest difference is that Prowl lacks the fear that Starscream has for the double edge of those tools. 

If someone were to hand Prowl a knife capable of slitting the throat of unicron at the cost of unimaginable pain for as long as he held it, Prowl would trip over his own legs in the rush to try and get a hold of it. 

As far as Metroplex can tell, Prowl is truly convinced that his plans are the only ones that are right for Cybertron. Caught in a delusion that, if people only listened, the world could be made perfect with his hands.  
There were many mecha like him, even before the war started. Desillusioned and bitter mecha, murmuring of how the world would be perfect if they were the ones to orchestrate it all. The big difference between them and Prowl was that Prowl had not stopped attempting to shape the world to his ideal when he found out that everyone was against him and his ideas. 

Prowl was smart enough to see when he was beaten. He would play the surly defeated foe – he dragged up bitterness from old memories so he could hide away smug smirks when mecha played into his hands. Ruthless. So ruthless.  
He did not stab people in the back the same way that Starscream did. He led mecha to where he wanted them with carefully placed words, prods, and suggestions. Like a metallurgist he slowly added new ingredients to his concoction until the inevitable chain reaction began. 

Mecha only found out what Prowl had done to them, to their lives, to their friends, after it had happened, or after it had barely failed. They would come to Prowl, angry enough to hang him by his own fuel cables, and he would explain to them the alternatives. Driving circles around them with wit and logic that most didn’t want to think about. 

Prowl was hated and Prowl let the hate slide off him as if it were fire-retardant foam. Or at least, he tried to. 

Maybe he had been successful in it during the war but having his mind controlled and nobody jumping to his aid had damaged whatever armour Prowl wore around his sanity. He had chosen to have no friends for the sake of the universe and the good of all, but Bombshell’s mindcontrol had shown him exactly what the consequences were of not having friends.  
Nobody was able to see that he had changed. Nobody had _cared_ about where he went and what he did. Nobody had missed him, not even his intricate plans to save the world. 

And now Prowl had stalkers. Mecha that he disliked and hated that dogged his steps and admired his brutal plans. Just when Prowl had seen what mecha thought of his plans, and just how Decepticon they were, he had gained incessant stalkers whose only love for him was centered around those plans. Painful reminders. 

Metroplex is frightened of Prowl and what Prowl could do if he ever learned how Metroplex worked. He doesn’t dare to try and become personal. So instead he works to keep the Constructicons away from Prowl when he is in recharge. He locks doors whenever Prowl is too tired to remember, and he shuts down commlink traffic when he knows that Scavenger and Hook are planning to send him messages on every available bandwidth.  
Until Prowl’s optics thaw out and his plans go dusty, Metroplex intends to pretend that he is simply a slow meandering giant who isn’t worth using. He doubts Prowl will fall for it. Someday, Metroplex will be a part of one of his plans, and Metroplex knows he won’t see it coming. 

-

Jazz is one of the handful of mecha that sometimes disappears from his sensors. He treads lightly and his systems run so quiet that Metroplex can only hear them when Jazz sits near one of the audial sensors on his frame.  
Metroplex believes that Jazz has long since figured out how to spot the sensors and receptors in his frame, because he always seems to avoid stepping or sitting on them. It isn’t a surprise to Metroplex – Jazz had not survived the war because he was shoddy at Special Ops - but what _was_ a surprise was that Jazz did not bother to damage or block the sensors that Metroplex had in his home. 

During the first few cycles, Metroplex had assumed it to be a mindgame. A way to show that he had nothing to hide, or a way to seem harmless and non-threatening to Starscream – perhaps thinking that Metroplex would report on his every living moment. 

It did not take long for that assumption to fall through. Jazz, for all that he appeared to be doing alright, is unhappy. And not in the way that most other inhabitants are.  
There are no nightmares that he wakes from with screams and shivering plating. There’s no lingering paranoia that drives him to obsessively check his home or stalk mecha he doesn’t trust. Jazz is simply not happy where he is, despite there being more peace than ever. 

Metroplex wonders if it is the lack of battle and missions. He wonders if Jazz is the kind of mech to miss the slick slide of energon between his fingers, and the rush of ending a life. He tries to help in his own way, as best as he can, by sending Jazz recommendations for violent and gorey movies. The kind that wasn’t really made anymore nowadays because everyone alive has _lived_ it. He brings Jazz’s commlink address to a number of mental health clinics and signs him up for their newsletters on how to cope with war and loss.  
Jazz doesn’t seem to notice. He continued his daily business, going out and meeting friends, even as his habsuite slowly turned filthy and cluttered. Jazz had not unpacked a single containment since moving in – whenever he needed something he would dig it out, and when he was done he would toss it down on the floor. 

One time, Metroplex happens to be watching Jazz as the mech activates his Spec Ops cloaking programs. His footsteps taper off into nothing, and he suddenly seems to know exactly how to stay out of Metroplex’s camera range. If Metroplex had not been watching him, he most certainly would have lost Jazz in the crowd.  
Metroplex knew that Jazz wouldn’t appreciate his gawking, but he had a duty to all of his inhabitants, and when one mech seemed to be a risk for the others he wanted to know. 

Jazz’s route was long and seemingly nonsensical. Detours here and there – entering shops and cafes at random before squeezing out of an ‘employees only’ door or a near-forgotten window at the back. His final destination was a science lab. One of Wheeljack’s early programs that had been moved to other mecha once Starscream had gotten the scientist to work for him.  
It was a place for scientifically inclined mecha to come together and study organic life. Metroplex knew that there was nothing there that a Spec Ops agent would find useful for terrorism or assault. Organics were frail enough that half of them couldn’t even stand near a Cybertronian without contracting a radiation sickness from the energon in their lines. Was Jazz visiting a friend? 

Jazz avoided every other mech inside of the building, and slowly worked his way to the department where the scientists kept non-sentient specimens. As far as Metroplex was aware, the only species willing to trade with live organics at this point in time were the humans. Inside of a tiny terrarium, a selection of earthen animals had been collected and given a natural environment where they could be studied.  
They were harmless organics, if you forgave the filth they shed and drooped from their orifices, and Metroplex could not think of any reason for Jazz to infiltrate here. 

Jazz fed the organic and watched it for a long time, letting out deep sighs from his vents at intervals so regular that Metroplex was tempted to think that he had a glitch in his cooling system. It was puzzling. Was Jazz interested in organics? Then why hadn’t he applied to become a caretaker for the organics stored here?  
His answer came when Jazz returned home and broke open one of his containers only to pull out…. Miniatures. Alien miniatures, some so oddly shaped that Metroplex could not imagine what they were good for, and incredibly delicate. 

Jazz had been stationed on Earth, Metroplex suddenly remembered. He listened to music from Earth. He still had his alt mode from Earth, he had kept memento’s of Earth…Could it be that Jazz was… homesick?  
He began to listen a little more intently to the conversations Jazz had with his friends, noting all the moments where the mech used alien words and expressions – clumsily translated to try and capture whatever the original language had been trying to convey. He heard alien names often, especially when Jazz spoke to mecha that had been to Earth as well. The music he purchased from Blaster was almost entirely made up out of alien broadcasts – low quality radio waves with repetitive noises and odd warbling and soundmixing….

But if Jazz missed Earth, why was he here? 

Metroplex didn’t understand, but he didn’t need to know why Jazz felt the way he did to try and help. He began to collect Earth data, to make sure Jazz didn’t miss out on anything, and when his space bridge was finally back in operation he dropped invitations and flyers in Jazz’s comm. 

Jazz never took him up on the offer. Not even when the Space bridge opened up to the public and Cybertronian visits to Earth had been approved by a great number of Earths’ ruling countries. Jazz loved anything the humans made and treated even the flimsiest of their creations with care and amusement, but he never stepped through the space bridge, and he didn’t stop visiting the collection of organics in the sparse little lab. 

-

Metroplex had been built as a protector – a function that he had never been able to fulfil with peace of mind. He had been created to protect the smaller mecha on Cybertron – the mecha living inside of his walls - but it was those very mecha that had ended up becoming his enemies.  
Now that the war was over, and mecha were returning home, Metroplex found that there were different ways to help protect the mecha living inside of him. With simple kindnesses and courtesies that had become unusual and dangerous during the war. 

For the mecha inside of him, it would be dangerous to trust. Anyone could be an enemy in disguise, the final knife in the back, but Metroplex had more armour than most and he intended to make use of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive me if the ending seems rushed - I had a difficult time writing this and near the end I was quite tired! I run a small discord server for Transformers, which you can join via this link; https://discord.gg/gRJw2wJ 
> 
> My writing blog; insecwrites.tumblr.com


End file.
